Hi everyone, I was attracted by the thread title: "Ways of Making a Song". I hope you can take the time to visit my post on how to make notations with Korg DS-10, cause I am hoping that it could be considered as "Another Way to Making A Song" via notations. The link to my post is here:

I also track half-speed most of the time, and I even have one song where I go into the extreme: quatrain-speed (1/4th speed). This song is not yet released though.

I usually start with an idea (overall kind of sound) that I want to accomplish, because they come with certain design requirements. For instance, if I want to make a song featuring a guitar, like Walking or BaseFlow, I will use most of my drums for guitar sounds.

I then start to build the sounds, usually first the drums then the synths. I then start building a first pattern and see what I can get with the current sound and tweak where necessary. Sometimes I have an idea for an intro. If so, I make that first, and on pattern 2 or 3 I start making the actual start.

I always try to ensure that I have groups of 2 or 4 patterns (by playing the lead over 4 patterns) as some kind of mini song in the song, or refrain of some sort. If you make it, you can easily play this back later in your song without it being repetitive. Do note, that in order to do this successfully, you must try to make each of these 4 pattern parts as varied as possible. You can hear this in my songs which you can find on http://youtube.com/lpchip

In one song, I made copies of the last section of patterns and alter the notes so the melody seems to be different each time. This effectively makes it able for me to reuse patterns without the listener actually realising it. See: